ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses two songs: Gruppe aus dem Tartarus (Group from Hades) Friedrich von Schiller, and Scblaflied (Slumber Song) Johann Mayrhofer. Schiller's poem concerns a group of tormented souls from the deepest region of Hades asking each other when their suffering will end; Mayrhofer's a boy who has responded to the call of the woods and the river and has been healed of all pain. Franz Schubert may have selected the songs because they contrast those outside nature with someone immersed in it. Schiller maintained that the naive represents the vanished paradise of childhood, the lost state of innocence when we felt at one with nature. With the poems he had at his disposal, Schubert could not indicate how Schiller removed the opposition between the naive and the sentimental, and therefore between Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and himself, all he could do was to present extreme examples of yearning self-consciousness and innocence.
